“I gave you eight months of my time . . . and what did you do with it?”
“I made a terrible mistake.”
“Finally—a hint of self-knowledge. I’m not interested. Just go away, and never call me again.”
I hung up, then took the phone off the hook.
I fought the temptation of another bracing shot of Scotch. A few minutes later, my intercom rang. Oh Jesus, he was here. I went into the kitchen and lifted the intercom’s earpiece, then shouted:
“I told you, I never want to see you again.”
“There’s a coffee shop on the corner,” Jack said, his voice cracking on the bad line. “I’ll wait there for you.”
“Don’t waste your time,” I said. “I’m not coming.”
Then I hung up.
For the next half an hour I tried to do things. I dealt with a day’s worth of dirty dishes in the sink. I made myself a cup of coffee. I brought it over to my desk. I sat down and attempted to proofread the four columns I had written during the blizzard. Finally, I got up, grabbed my coat and headed out.
It was a two-minute walk from my building to Gitlitz’s Delicatessen. He was sitting in a booth near the door. A cup of coffee was in front of him, as well as an ashtray with four stubbed-out butts. As I walked in, he was lighting up another Lucky Strike. He jumped to his feet, an anxious smile on his face.
“I was starting to give up hope . . . ,” he said.
“Give up hope,” I said, sliding into the booth. “Because ten minutes from now, I’m walking out of here.”
“It is so wonderful to see you,” he said, sitting back down opposite me. “You don’t know how wonderful . . .”
I cut him off.
“I could use a cup of coffee,” I said.
“Of course, of course,” he said, motioning to the waitress. “And what do you want to eat?”
“Nothing.”
“You sure?”
“I have no appetite.”
He reached for my hand. I pulled it away.
“You look so damn beautiful, Sara.”
I glanced at my watch. “Nine minutes, fifteen seconds. Your time’s running out, Jack.”
“You really hate me, don’t you?”
I dodged that one by glancing back at my watch. “Eight minutes, forty-five seconds.”
“I made a very bad call.”
“Words is cheap . . . as they say in Brooklyn.”
He winced, then took a deep drag on his cigarette. The waitress arrived with my coffee.
“You’re right,” he said. “What I did was inexcusable.”
“All you had to do was answer one of my letters. You got them all, didn’t you?”
“Yes, all of them. They were fantastic, extraordinary. So extraordinary I’ve kept them all.”
“I’m touched. Next thing you’re going to tell me is you showed them all to . . . what was her name again?”
“Dorothy.”
“Ah yes, Dorothy. Very Wizard of Oz. Let me guess: you met her in Kansas with her little dog, Toto . . .”
I shut myself up. “I think I should leave,” I said.
“Don’t. Sara, I am so damn sorry . . .”
“I must have written you . . . what?”
“Thirty-two letters, forty-four postcards,” he said.
I looked at him carefully.
“That’s a very precise inventory.”
“I prized each and every one of them.”
“Oh, please. Lies I can just about handle. But schmaltzy lies . . .”
“It’s the truth.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“She was pregnant, Sara. I didn’t know that when I met you.”
“But you obviously knew her, some way or another, when you met me. Otherwise she couldn’t have become pregnant by you. Or have I got that wrong too?”
He sighed heavily, exhaling a lungful of smoke.
“I met her in August forty-five. Stars and Stripes had just transferred me back to England after that assignment in Germany. I was doing a three-month stint at their main European bureau, which happened to be located at Allied HQ just outside of London. Dorothy was working at HQ as a typist. She’d just graduated from college—and had volunteered her services to the military. ‘I had this romantic idea of wanting to do my bit for the war effort,’ she later told me. ‘I saw myself as some Hemingway heroine, working in a field hospital.’ Instead, the Army made her a secretary in London. One day, during a coffee break in the canteen, we got talking. She was bored in the typing pool. I was bored rewriting other journalists all day. We started seeing each other after work. We started sharing a bed. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t passion. It was just . . . something to do. A way of passing the time in the Ho-Hum capital of England. Sure, we liked each other. But we both knew that this was just one of those passing flings, with no future beyond our stint in England.
“A couple of months later, at the start of November, I was told I was going to cover the start of postwar reconstruction in Germany . . . but could first take some leave in the States. When I broke the news to her that I was departing, she was a little sad . . . but also realistic. It had been pleasant. We liked each other. And I thought she was really swank. Hell, I was a Catholic mick from Brooklyn, whereas she was this classy Episcopalian from Mount Kisco. I went to Erasmus High. She went to Rosemary Hall and Smith. She was way out of my league. She knew this too—though she was too damn nice to ever say that to me. Part of me was flattered that she’d even deigned to spend time with me. But stuff like this happens during wartime. She’s there, you’re there . . . so, why not?
“Anyway, I sailed from England on November tenth, never expecting to see Dorothy again. Two weeks later, I met you. And . . .”
He broke off, stubbing out his cigarette. Then he fished out another Lucky Strike and lit it up.
“And what?” I asked quietly.
“I knew.”
Silence.
“It was immediate and instantaneous,” he said. “A complete jolt. But I knew.”
I stared down into my coffee cup. I said nothing. He reached again for my hand. I kept it flat on the table. His fingers touched mine. I felt myself shudder. I wanted to pull my hand away again. I didn’t move it. When he spoke again, his voice was a near whisper:
“Everything I said to you that night, I meant. Everything, Sara.”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“Yes, you do.”
Now I pulled my hand away. “No, I don’t.”
“You knew, Sara.”
“Yes, of course I fucking knew,” I hissed. “Thirty-two letters, forty-four postcards . . . and you ask me if I knew. I didn’t simply miss you. I longed for you. I didn’t want to, but I did. And when you didn’t respond . . .”
He reached inside his overcoat and pulled out two envelopes. He placed them in front of me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Two letters I wrote you, but never sent.”
I stared down at them. The envelopes were embossed with the U.S. Army seal. They both looked worn and a little aged.
“The first letter was written on the ship back to Germany,” he said. “I was planning to mail this to you as soon as we docked in Hamburg. But when I arrived there, a letter was waiting for me from Dorothy, telling, me she was pregnant. I immediately requested a weekend leave, and took the boat train to London. On the way there, I made up my mind to tell her that, much as I liked her, I couldn’t marry her. Because . . . ,” another deep drag of his cigarette, “. . . because I wasn’t in love with her. And because I had met you. But when I got to England, she . . .”
“What? Fell into your arms? Cried? Said that she was so afraid you were going to abandon her? Then told you she loved you?”
“Yeah—all of the above. She also said her family would disown her if she had the child on her own. Having since met them, I know she was telling the truth. Don’t blame her . . .”
“Why the hell would I blame he
r? Had I been in her position, I would have done exactly the same thing.”
“I felt I had no choice. The old Jesuit teaching kicked in: you are accountable for your actions . . . you cannot escape the sins of the flesh . . . all that enlightened Catholic guilt stuff compelled me to tell her that, yes, I would marry her.”
“That was very responsible of you.”
“She’s a decent woman. We don’t have major problems. We get along. It’s . . . amiable, I guess.”
I made no comment. After a moment, he touched one of the envelopes and said, “I wrote the second letter to you on my way back to Hamburg. In it, I explained . . .”
“I really don’t want to know your explanations,” I said, pushing both letters back toward him.
“At least take them home and read them . . .”
“What’s the point? What happened happened . . . and over four years ago. We had a night together. I thought it might be the start of something. I was wrong. C’est la vie. End of story. I’m not angry at you for “doing your duty” and marrying Dorothy. It’s just . . . you could have saved me a lot of grief and heartache had you just come clean with me, and told me what was going on.”
“I wanted to. That’s what the second letter was about. I wrote it on the boat train back to Hamburg. But when I arrived there, and found three of your letters waiting for me, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do.”
“So you decided that the best approach was to do nothing. To refuse to answer my letters. To keep me dangling. Or maybe you just hoped I’d finally get the message and vanish?”
He stared down into his coffee cup, and fell silent. Eventually I spoke. “Ego te absolvo . . . is that what you want me to say? Shame I could have dealt with. Guilt I could have dealt with. The truth I could have dealt with. But you chose silence. After swearing love to me—which is a huge thing to swear to anybody—you couldn’t face up to the simple ethical problem of coming clean with me.”
“I didn’t want to hurt you . . .”
“Oh, Jesus Christ—don’t feed me that dumb cliché,” I said, a wave of anger hitting me. “You hurt me more by keeping me in the dark. And then when you deigned to send a postcard to me, what was your message? ‘I’m sorry.’ After eight months and all those letters, that’s all you could say. How I despised you when that card arrived on my doormat.”
“Sometimes we do things we don’t even understand ourselves.”
He stubbed out the cigarette. He was about to light up another one, but thought better of it. He looked disconcerted and sad—as if he didn’t know what to do next.
“I really should go,” I said.
I started to stand up, but he took my hand.
“I’ve known exactly where you’ve lived for the past couple of years. I’ve read everything you’ve written in Saturday Night/Sunday Morning. I’ve wanted to call you every day.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Because I couldn’t. Until today. When I saw you in the park, I knew immediately that . . .”
I removed his hand from mine, and interrupted him. “Jack, this is pointless.”
“Please let me see you again.”
“I don’t go out with married men. And you are married, remember?”
I turned and moved quickly out the front door, not looking back to see if he was following me. The January night air was like a slap across the face. I was about to turn back west toward my apartment, but feared that he might come calling again. So I headed south down Broadway, ducking into a bar in the lobby of the Ansonia Hotel. I sat at a table near the door. I downed a J&B. I called for one more.
“Sometimes we do things we don’t even understand ourselves.”
Yes—like falling in love with you.
I threw some money on the table. I stood up and left. I hailed a cab. I told him to head downtown. When we reached 34th Street, I told him to head back uptown. The cabbie was bemused by this sudden change of direction.
“Lady, do you have any idea where you’re going?” he asked.
“None at all,” I said.
I had the cab drop me in front of my apartment. Much to my relief, Jack wasn’t loitering outside. But he had paid me a visit, as the two envelopes were waiting for me on the inside front doormat. I picked them up. I let myself into my apartment. I took off my coat. I went into the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove. I tossed both letters into the trash can. I made myself a cup of tea. I went into the living room. I put on a Budapest String Quartet recording of Mozart’s K. 421 quartet. I sat on the sofa and tried to listen to the music. After five minutes, I stood up, walked into the kitchen, and retrieved the letters from the trash. I sat down at the kitchen table. I laid the envelopes before me. I stared down at them for a long time, willing myself not to open them. The Mozart played on. Eventually, I picked up the first envelope. It was addressed to my old Bedford Street apartment. The address was smudged, as if it had been briefly exposed to rain. The envelope itself was crumpled, worn, aged. But it was still sealed. I tore it open. Inside was a single piece of Stars and Stripes stationery. Jack’s handwriting was clear, fluent, easy to decipher.
November 27th, 1945
My beautiful Sara,
So here I am—somewhere off the coast of Nova Scotia. We’ve been at sea for two days now. Another week to go before we dock in Hamburg. My “state room” could be politely called “intimate” (it’s 10’x6’—the size of a jail cell). It’s also less than private, as I share it with five other guys, two of whom are congenital snorers. Leave it to the Army to figure out a way of fitting six soldiers into a broom closet. No wonder we won the War.
When we hoisted anchor in Brooklyn two days ago, I had to stop myself from jumping overboard, swimming to shore, hopping the subway back to Manhattan, and knocking on your Bedford Street door. But that would have cost me a year in the brig—whereas this current penal sentence is only nine more months. And you better be waiting for me at the Brooklyn Naval Yards when we dock in September . . . otherwise I might do something rash and self-destructive, like becoming a Christian Brother.
What can I say, Miss Smythe? Only this: people always talk about that thing called at first sight. I never believed in it myself . . . and always thought it was the stuff of bad movies (usually starring Jane Wyman).
But maybe the reason I didn’t believe in it was because it didn’t happen to me. Until you.
Isn’t life wonderfully absurd? On my last night in New York I crash a party I shouldn’t be at, and . . . there you are. And almost immediately, I thought: I am going to marry her.
And I will . . . if you’ll have me.
All right, I’m being a little premature. All right, I’m probably getting a little carried away. But love is supposed to make you a little impetuous and daffy.
Our staff sergeant is calling us for mess duty, so I’ve got to end here. This gets mailed the moment I reach Hamburg. In the meantime, I will only think of you night-and-day.
Love,
Jack
As soon as I finished reading the letter, I read it again. And again after that. How I wanted to be distrustful, skeptical, hard-boiled. But instead all I could feel was sadness. A sense of what was there between us in the immediate aftermath of that night. A sense of what might have been.
I picked up the other envelope. Just as smudged, just as crumpled. A reminder that paper—like people—ages noticeably after four years.
January 3rd, 1946
Dear Sara,
I did some math today, and worked out that it has been thirty-seven days since I said goodbye to you in Brooklyn. I set sail that day, thinking: I have met the love of my life. All the way across the Atlantic, I started scheming of ways I could legally get myself out of being an Army journalist and back to you in Manhattan without facing a court martial.
Then, when we docked in Hamburg, there was a letter waiting for me. A letter which has turned my life upside down.
For the next five paragraphs, he told me the story of how he had m
et an American typist named Dorothy while stationed in England, how it had been a passing fling, and how it had ended in early November.
But then—upon docking last week in Hamburg—he had received word from her that she was pregnant. He’d visited her in London. Dorothy had cried with relief when he arrived—as she feared he might abandon her. But he wasn’t the abandoning type.
All actions have a potential consequence. Sometimes we get lucky and dodge the repercussions. Sometimes we pay the price. Which is what I am doing now.
This is the hardest letter I’ve ever written—because you are the woman I want to be with for the rest of my life. Yes, I feel that absolute, that certain. How do I know? I just know.
But there is nothing I can do to change the situation. I must do the responsible thing. I must marry Dorothy.
I want to beat my head against a wall, and curse myself for losing you. Because I know that, from this moment onwards, you will haunt my every move.
I love you.
I am so sorry.
Try, somehow, to forgive me.
Jack
Oh, you fool. You big dumb fool. Why the hell didn’t you send this letter? I would have understood. I would have believed you. I would have forgiven you on the spot. I would have coped. I would have eventually gotten over it. And I would have never started hating you.
But you couldn’t face . . . what? Hurting me? Letting me down? Or simply admitting the whole damn lousy business?
But the act of admission—of owning up to a mistake, an error of judgment, a bad call—is sometimes the hardest thing imaginable. Especially when, like Jack, you suddenly find yourself cornered by a biological accident.
“You really believe his story?” Eric asked me later that night on the phone.
“In a way, it makes sense, and explains . . .”
“What? The fact that he’s a moral coward, who couldn’t give you the benefit of the truth?”
“He did tell me that he’d made a terrible mistake.”
“We all make terrible mistakes. Sometimes they’re forgiven, sometimes they’re not. The question is: do you want to forgive him?”
Long pause. I finally said, “Isn’t forgiveness always easier for everyone involved?”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 32
